Mr. Fergal O'Brien:

The Irish economy is a phenomenon at the moment. We view all of these issues through the K shape and see many sectors of the economy continuing to perform incredibly strongly. The life sciences, technology and services sectors are all rapidly expanding, hiring and investing. On the downside of the K, it is very hard to disentangle Covid from Brexit right now and so many companies are dealing with similar challenges. I have seen previous research that indicated that the Brexit impact on individuals will be quite different from the Covid impact on individuals. In many cases, those people will be in the same regions and homes. I mean we could have someone working in tourism and someone working in food processing, for example. I am quite concerned about the regional impacts. Overall, the economy will perform quite strongly next year. There is going to be an unleashing of activity. We know that households have saved €1 billion extra every single month since the start of this crisis but that does not mean individuals, many companies and many regions are not going to be left behind because I think they will. The phenomenon of this year, despite what we have seen around Europe, is that the GDP of the Irish economy may not fall that much because some sectors are doing really well while others are not. It is a parallel economy that we have never seen before.